In conjunction with the organization’s fifteenth anniversary,
Artpace San Antonio organized a Texas-wide exhibition of thirteen
billboards created by artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres between 1989 and
1995. Developed with special permission from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Foundation, this presentation was the first-ever comprehensive survey of
Gonzalez-Torres' billboard works in the United States. The billboards
were on view throughout 2010 in various locations in the cities of
Dallas, El Paso, Houston and San Antonio. Major underwriting for this
Billboard Exhibition was provided by the Linda Pace Foundation, with
generous in-kind support from Clear Channel Outdoor.

During
the run of the exhibition, Artpace also facilitated a series of
conversations between Leslie Moody Castro, Andy Campbell and Noah
Simblist. This material was originally meant to serve as an educational
component to the exhibition, but has remained unpublished until now. We
wish to thank Artpace San Antonio and education curator Alex Freeman for
making this project a reality.

In this issue of …mbg,
we are pleased to include two excerpts from the conversation about
queer activism in the 1980s and how we might read Felix Gonzalez-Torres’
activist gestures today. In our February 4th issue, we will feature a
second installment of this conversation, focusing specifically on the
politics of display surrounding Gonzalez-Torres’ work.

Queer Activism: Then/Now

Leslie
Moody Castro [LMC]: Why don’t we start with queer activism,
specifically in the historical moment when these billboards were made.
How you think that translates to the current political and historical
moment?

Noah Simblist [NS]: One thing that’s interesting to me is
the state of the AIDS crisis then versus now. Obviously it’s different
today because people can live with AIDS much longer, so there’s not the
same kind of animosity surrounding the disease that there was during the
Reagan-Bush era. But at the same time, I wonder what it means for a
contemporary artist to make an activist gesture in the way that these
billboards were originally conceived, as opposed to them being restaged
curatorially in this exhibition. Are they still activist images? Is the
activism represented in the original action that Felix Gonzalez-Torres
staged; is the activism inherent in the images; or does the activism
take place when these images are presented in public spaces?

Andy
Campbell [AC]: To me, I feel there’s been a real shift in the center of
queer politics, so locating queerness in terms of the activist agenda
is very different now. In the late 1980s, the struggle was actually
mentioning—verbally discussing—people living with HIV/AIDS in any
capacity, whereas now when the big political struggle is the
normalization of queers (although I wouldn’t call that agenda a “queer”
agenda, necessarily). I share your same question: is the curatorial
restaging a blip or rupture of mainstream gay politics now, or does it
reify them? Are we normalizing the billboards in the city?

NS: It made me think of this conversation that I heard between Gregg Bordowitz and David Getsy about queerness on Bad at Sports.
It was fantastic! They talk about defining queerness by making the
choice “yes/and” as opposed to “yes or no,” and I think the billboard
project, like all of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, is often about that.
In that sense, queerness does not necessarily have to be about the
politics of sexuality. Queerness can also be the approach to questions
like: what is an artwork? What is beauty and the relationship between
beauty and politics, or the relationship between art and politics? All
of these things can be “queered,” and this billboard project is very
much doing that. I think it can also help us get outside of this “us vs.
them” binary, which was very much a part of the discourse and debate of
the ‘80s and ‘90s, where conservatives would lambast “those dirty
people, those dirty prostitutes...”

AC: And homosexuals.

NS:
Yes, conservatives would say that the dregs of society were getting
sick because of their own actions, and that they would perform those
actions in “their” spaces, but that “our” spaces were safe and pure and
clean. The billboards were a total queering of that notion of “us and
them,” in the way that their politics intersected and politicized “our”
space. At the same time, this was done in a way that didn’t subscribe to
the clichés of what “they” looked like.

AC: I feel like the work
is important in a different way in terms of queerness: that it can
blend but it can also be a disruption. It’s not an “either/or,” as you
said, Noah, it’s more of a “yes/and” thing. How can we aggregate these
choices together rather than shutting down a radical voice that seems to
be a little bit more unpleasant?

NS: The AIDS crisis has also
shifted geographically over the past 30 years. New York and San
Francisco became the centers for it in the ‘80s, but now it is much more
prevalent in Africa and Asia. I wonder what it would mean for these
billboards to be seen in Johannesburg or a township in South Africa.

Pluralism and Activism: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his Contemporaries

LMC:
I know that you were interested in the relationships between Group
Material and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Could you speak about that, Noah?

NS:
Group Material was an artist collective in New York that involved up to
20 people between 1979-1996. At any given time the numbers were
changing, as people were joining or leaving the group. In the end the
main participants were Julie Ault, Doug Ashford and Felix
Gonzalez-Torres. Ault and Ashford were the most consistent within the
group, along with Tim Rollins. Ault recently published a book called Show and Tell:A Chronicle of Group Material,
one of the best documentations of the entire project. Essentially their
artistic practice comprised curating exhibitions around various
political themes, like the U.S. involvement in Latin America in the
1980s or the AIDS crisis.

The latter was something that Felix
Gonzalez-Torres also addressed in his own work, particularly after the
death of his lover Ross. I think that he had various ways of mediating
the experience of mourning. There are many ways that he used to
ritualize mourning, both physically and visually in space. This was
something that he needed to do for himself, while at the same time
realizing that the personal act of mourning had a communal implication. I
think that he was also very aware of the fact that his public mourning
had a political implication.

LMC: So he’s dealing with being a
homosexual male in public, mourning in public, openly stating that this
work is created for Ross while fully aware of the consequences, all
amidst the beginning of the AIDS crisis in which the art word is
literally dying. There was no advocacy; there were no clinics; there was
no knowledge being disseminated to stop this and deal with this issue.

NS:
Yes, and the context of the 1980s is so interesting. This is this
moment when Reagan had been elected and a wave of conservatism emerged
from the country. There were people like Jerry Falwell who were becoming
very powerful and acting against perceived subversives who were against
patriotism and Christian American values. AIDS was a health crisis
affecting a particular segment of the citizenry of the U.S. that was
deemed immoral, and so it was ignored. It was ironically an
antidemocratic action to ignore it and to pretend that this thing didn’t
exist. I think that there were a lot of activists that became very much
engaged in reversing silence, in becoming very loud and reversing this
erasure by becoming very visually bold. In addition to Group Material,
groups like ACT UP with people like Gregg Bordowitz were very much
engaged in starting the conversation. I find it interesting that in his
solo projects Felix Gonzalez-Torres would take an angle that was so
political and bold, by transferring something that is as private as a
bedroom, like “Untitled” (1991), into the public space of a billboard.
But at the same time he did this using an image that isn’t explicitly
provocative.

LMC: Well there is that quote of his: “Two clocks
side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an
image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks, because they cannot use me
as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning.”

NS: But I
believe in a kind of pluralism for those different activist approaches. I
feel that it is very interesting to have Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio
(1978) and ACT UP and Felix Gonzalez-Torres working at the same time.
Because that communicates a kind of diversity that subverts the
conservative idea that all homosexuals and artists and intellectuals are
communist perverts. It gets away from that kind of universalizing so
that you can say that there are lots of different kinds of “perverts!”

AC:
And there were many that actively embraced that label of “pervert.” At
least those in the kink communities were used to being labeled as
perverts by broader gay and lesbian communities by the ‘90s. I think of
Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait/Pervert (1994), where she’s got
the word carved in gorgeous type across her chest. It’s cutting, sure,
but from a kink perspective it’s downright erotic.

LMC: All this
pluralism in sexual and activist expression gets away from this very
contradictory idea of hegemonizing the other—if that’s even possible. So
another thing that I was going to ask you about is the tone of his
work. So many activist organizations have so much anger around them, and
so much of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work is so quiet that it almost
becomes meditative. There is an absence of anger in mourning, which is
one of the processes of coping. Do you see any anger in his work?

NS:
Along with the rest of Group Material, he would choose artists that
were very angry—not that he was personally constructing angry images,
but through the kind of discourse that he was involved in with Julie
Ault, Doug Ashford, and everyone else that was involved, and through the
discourse of the artists that they would invite to participate in the
Group Material exhibitions. He would choose artists along with the rest
of Group Material that were very angry, like in the AIDS Timeline
in 1990 for instance. That same notion of pluralism that we were
talking about before also has to do with one’s own reaction to a crisis.
So while Group Material gave him the outlet for rowdy anger, I think
that his work was able to be more meditative, slow and quiet—it provoked
more questions than it necessarily gave the answers to.

AC: I
agree with Noah, but I think that openness allows for anger. Even the
elegiac stacks and spills hold some anger for me. I get angry looking at
it, touching it and taking home, as much as I get sad. Nevermind that
half the time I get angry because there’s an overt surveillance of the
work—take one piece but no more!—that I think is a disgrace to the
legacy and generosity of the work. But that’s a different reason to be
angry!

Leslie Moody Castro is the visitor services manager
at Arthouse at the Jones Center, and a former graduate intern at Artpace
San Antonio. She graduated with her Master's Degree from The
University of Texas at Austin in 2010 in Museum Education, and worked at
the Blanton Museum of Art while earning her graduate degree. Moody
Castro has also curated exhibitions at Women and Their Work, Mexic-Arte
Museum, and is a co-founder of Co-Lab, Austin.

Noah
Simblist is an Associate Professor of Art at SMU and a PhD student in
art history at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent
curatorial endeavor, the group exhibition Out of Place, is on view at
Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin through March 5.

Andy
Campbell is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the
University of Texas in Austin. He is currently writing about gay and
lesbian leather communities and visual cultures in the 1970s. He is
co-curator of the group exhibition SUBstainability, which opens on
January 20 at the Texas State University Gallery in San Marcos.